u/sunchaseRN

14 week old baby. He’s pretty much had a 10 PM bedtime for… forever. We always start his wind down routine (lotion, PJ’s, sleep sack/swaddle, bottle, bounce to sleep) around 8:30 PM, and wake him up for the day at 7:30 every morning. We’ve been consistent with that for probably 6 weeks now. The issue isn’t the 10 PM bedtime itself, but I can’t figure out how to accommodate naps. He’s a difficult napper, even contact naps only yield 20-30 min of sleep. He averages 2 hours total of naps over 3-4 naps a day. We were shooting for 1.5 hr WW’s but I posted here awhile back about how hard he is to get to sleep at times and people suggested longer WW’s. We are currently doing 1.5/2/2/2/2.5-3. He has always preferred a long last WW. Last nap falls around 5 PM and is VERY hard to grab no matter what we do… contact nap/carrier/stroller doesn’t matter. He’s hard to get down and he’ll only sleep maybe 15 minutes.

I don’t see him being able to take even another catnap around 7. So currently he’s awake from 5 PM-ish until he decides to go to sleep at 10, despite our best efforts to get him down around 8-9 every. single. night. He does rub his eyes and yawn and gets cranky, it’s impossible to entertain him, but yet his eyes will just be wide open until 10 rolls around.

I feel like we’ve made adjustments for undertired vs. overtired and nothing makes a difference. I don’t know how his bedtime will ever shift back if we don’t keep trying to get him down sooner. I guess I’m just confused on what direction to take with this.

Not sure how this keeps happening but starting to get frustrated. My son is 14 weeks and he’s not particularly big, he’s 24” long and about 12 pounds, hanging around 10th percentile. He’s got a little bit of a pot belly but he’s really not chubby. We did disposables for the first 4 weeks and then dove into GMD prefolds with Thirsties covers. The orange edge newborn size lasted maybe 2 weeks and then we went to the yellow edge (medium?) size. The issue was with the angel fold, the edges were barely coming together at the hips and the snappi had to be waaayyy stretched to reach. Then the cover to be tight enough around the thighs, was way too snug on the belly. Sizing up helped somewhat but was still awkward. Now the same thing is happening with the yellow edge prefolds, so I sized up to red edge, but he’s not ready for the next size up in covers without some serious gaps around the leg, but red edge prefolds with his current cover size leaves a lot of prefolds sticking up out the back.

We do disposable at night and are also kind of between sizes with those so maybe it’s just a phase? From what I’m seeing online it seems like the only solution may be to start pad folding but I hear that ends in lots of leaks, and he still poops 4-5x a day.

Am I missing something here or doing something wrong? I’ve been looking at picking up some pocket diapers to use on the go anyways so maybe that will be the answer to my problem?